By Dan Moren

July 12, 2017 7:22 AM PT

Quick Tip: Back up multiple Macs with Time Machine Server

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

When I set up my new iMac the other week, I ran into a complication: my old iMac had contained a separate 1TB internal hard drive that I’d used as, among other things, a network Time Machine backup location for my MacBook Air. But the new iMac only has a 512GB internal SSD, which I didn’t want to use for that purpose. So, how best to back up my MacBook Air and my new iMac?

I’d considered buying a NAS and using that to back up both of those Macs as well as my Mac mini, but Jason pointed me to another solution: macOS Server’s built-in Time Machine Server. I already use macOS Server for a handful of other tasks, like hosting a VPN, which meant I’d already shelled out for the $20 price tag. So, instead of spending a few hundred bucks on a NAS and the requisite drives, I instead bought The Wirecutter’s well-rated 4TB Seagate backup drive for just $100.¹

And, as it turns out, setting up Time Machine Server really couldn’t be easier: essentially you flip the On switch in macOS Server and pick where the backups are going to live. Then, on each computer you want to backup, select the new Time Machine backup location. That’s it. You’re done. (If you want more detailed instructions, Jeff Battersby has a walkthrough at Macworld.)

There’s just one caveat: by turning that drive into a backup location for Time Machine Server, you can’t also use it as a Time Machine drive for the server itself without partitioning it into two separate drives. So, for the moment, I’m relying on the SuperDuper! clone for my Mac mini and its CrashPlan integration. Though, given all the free space on that 4TB drive, I’ll probably partition it up at some point. Update: Reader Chris relates that this may not be the case. I can’t test presently as my Time Machine drive and Mac mini drive have different file formats, but your mileage may vary.

Update: As reader David points out, one option Time Machine Server does offer is the ability to limit each machine’s backup to a maximum size. This is a good idea, as otherwise, one of your Time Machine backups could just eat up all the available disk space. To do so, just select the backup location in Time Machine Server and hit the Edit button. Then enter a number of gigabytes for the limit. (As the dialog notes, you’ll have to be running Mavericks or later for the Macs to respect the limit.)

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

July 11, 2017 3:55 PM PT

1Password wants you to sync via the cloud, but won’t force you

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Over the weekend it seems that there was an uproar about the future of 1Password, despite a seeming lack of new news on the subject. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai summarizes at Motherboard:

In the last few years, 1Password has become a favorite for hackers and security researchers who often recommend it above all other alternatives… Last weekend, though, several security researchers tweeted that 1Password was moving away from allowing people to pay for a one-time license and have local password vaults, in favor of its cloud-based alternative that requires a monthly subscription.

It seems to me that there’s some conflation going on here. As with so many software products that mix mobile and desktop and cloud, 1Password’s publisher decided that the way forward for the product was to create a subscription package¹. When you subscribe to 1Password, you also get access to 1Password’s new cloud syncing service.

1Password believes—correctly, in my opinion—that for most users, a built-in cloud sync service designed specifically for 1Password is going to be a better option than using another cloud service like iCloud or Dropbox, which 1Password has supported for quite a while. 1Password is quite open about how its security is designed, including the fact that the decryption key for your passwords is never synced with the cloud, so even if a hacker were to penetrate 1Password’s security and get your online vaults, all they’d get access to is doubly-encrypted garbage.

Judging some of the Twitter threads I read today, what’s really happening is that some people simply hate the idea of software subscriptions and are sowing fear over 1Password’s security and local file syncing as a way of lashing out.

While Kate Sebald of AgileBits told me today that 1Password’s sync service is actually more secure that syncing a local vault via Dropbox or iCloud, it would have been a whole lot harder for AgileBits to convert users to a subscription model without a cloud-syncing service. Countless software companies have realized that offering ongoing subscription fees, integrated cloud services, and mobile-device syncing in a package is the best way to generate a sustainable revenue stream. I pay an annual fee for Office 365 and Adobe Photoshop and, quite frankly, they’re worth it. (And yes, both of those subscriptions include desktop, mobile, and cloud features.) Is 1Password worth $36/year (or $59/year for a family)? I think so, but your mileage may vary.

Still, AgileBits knows that a (loud, angry) portion of its customer base hates software subscriptions. A senior AgileBits person told me via email today that while it would have been much easier for the company to make 1Password a subscription-only product years ago, it has instead done extra work to allow both models to coexist.

As for using local storage for 1Password vaults: Sebald emphasized that the company will “go to great lengths to preserve [the] choice to use local vaults, even if we are encouraging new users to make a different choice.”

In other words: AgileBits is building a cloud service that it feels is safe, secure, and convenient for the vast majority of its users. But 1Password still supports local storage, too—and it seems like it will do so for the foreseeable future². The app isn’t going to force you to sync your passwords via its cloud service if you don’t want to. However, in terms of what the company communicates to its user base and recommends to new users, that’s going to be focused on using the 1Password.com sync service rather than local vaults, and the company is building new features like Travel Mode around the sync service.

By Dan Moren

July 5, 2017 1:23 PM PT

Meet the new iMac, definitely not the same as the old iMac

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

After six years I decided it was time to upgrade the ol’ iMac. My previous workhorse was a mid-2011 21.5-inch model, albeit with some special modifications: a 256GB SSD (as well as a 1TB hard drive), a built-to-order 2.8 GHz Core i7 processor, and 24GB of RAM. All of those improvements meant that it was still a plenty capable machine in 2017, but it had started to become a bit sluggish when doing heavy-lifting tasks, and there was the matter of an annoying persistent line of dead pixels on the display.

Over the years I’ve gotten so used to the blue line of pixels on my iMac that I don’t even see it. Today it decided to start turning red. pic.twitter.com/avcspFVfpa

— Dan Moren (@dmoren) June 14, 2017

So, with the announcement last month of the latest iMac revisions, my upgrade plans fell into place. I have no doubt I could have eked out another year or two from the old iMac, but the new models were enough of a revision to merit upgrading (Retina displays, Thunderbolt 3, much better discrete graphics, and so on) and happened to fall right into a perfect timing window for me.

I opted for a built-to-order 27-inch 5K Retina iMac, with a 4.2GHz Core i7, 512GB solid-state drive, and Magic Trackpad 2. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s the top of the line-model with the best processor currently available in a desktop Mac. (At least until the iMac Pro shows up later this year.) I chose to stick with the standard 8GB of RAM…but only so I could save some money by getting 16GB of additional RAM from OWC, bringing me to the same quantity I had in my previous machine—albeit with much better quality memory.¹

Now that I’ve spent several days with the new iMac, I’ve begun collecting my thoughts. Most importantly that I’m super glad I made this leap, since it’s already starting to pay dividends. But there are definitely a few things that have stood out to me in the past several days.

Retina display

This is, hard as it might be to believe, my first Retina Mac. I’m a MacBook Air user and have been since 2011, so the new MacBook and the Retina MacBook Pro have never really been on my radar. I also have a Mac mini, but it’s hooked up to my HDTV, so it’s hardly a true Retina experience.

Between the high-resolution and the improved colors, the 27-inch’s 5K screen is absolutely gorgeous. This is, of course, old news for everybody who’s been using a Retina Mac for the last five years, but it is difficult to overstate just how sharp and crisp text looks on this screen. I’m sure not getting any younger, and I’d started to feel on my old iMac that my eyes were perhaps going a bit—so far, the 5K iMac has made the reading experience vastly more pleasant—and as someone who deals with text a lot, it’s a welcome improvement. (It’s still a bit of an adjustment, especially when I open up what I’m used to being a huge image, like an iPhone screenshot, that actually looks…just kind of reasonably sized on this display.)

As far as the size goes, I was a little worried that jumping from the 21.5-inch to the 27-inch might simply feel too large. Less than a week in and I haven’t felt that once. Part of it is because that curved backing on more recent iMacs actually does make it feel surprisingly small. I’ve also long had a 27-inch Cinema Display that I’ve hooked my MacBook Air up to, so this isn’t my first time on a larger screen. Mostly it just feels “not cramped” to me, and I have a pretty hard time imagining going back.

Performance

Writing certainly isn’t the most performance-intensive task, but these days my job also involves producing a lot of podcasts, and shuttling around big audio files definitely requires a bit more horsepower. So far I’ve only edited one podcast on the new iMac, but the result was still striking: I had this week’s episode of Clockwise published less than 40 minutes after it wrapped up.² Tasks that often took a lot of time: transcoding, syncing audio files, even just copying files into GarageBand, took noticeably less time. I may have audibly gasped when I saved a large AIFF in Fission, an action that I often avoided on my old iMac because it involved sitting around and watching a progress bar. The dialog with the progress bar didn’t even appear.

At the end of the day, performance improvements for me aren’t so much about making what I’m actively doing faster as making me spend less time waiting for the computer to finish what it’s doing. This new iMac has already made me more productive by speeding up tasks where I used to end up walking away from my desk to go get a drink while it did its thing.

Sundries

There are a few other small things here and there that I’m liking or getting used to on this new machine. As I mentioned ahead of getting the new iMac, one of the features I was most looking forward to was having AirDrop. I take a lot of screenshots and often send them to my Macs for uploading or sending along with pieces I wrote. On my old iMac, which didn’t have the right hardware for AirDrop, I ended up using the excellent Printopia to “print” those images into Acorn for editing, but the workflow had begun to feel a bit more cumbersome since I’d gotten spoiled by using AirDrop on my MacBook Air.³

Perhaps the most difficult thing to get used to so far has been the Magic Keyboard. I liked the old Apple Wireless Keyboard; it had a nice key feel, could be surprisingly quiet, and was easy to navigate without looking. All of those things have changed on the Magic Keyboard. The keys have less travel, which has changed the feel of typing.⁴ It’s also louder and clickier than the old keyboard, which makes it a little harder to type discreetly when one is, say, recording a podcast. Finally, the rearranged key layouts—full-size keys on the F-keys and left/right cursors—has taken some acclimation for my touch-typing. I used to orient my right hand by finding those half-height cursors and I used to be able to more routinely hit the top two rows on the keyboard because I could locate the smaller F-keys. No doubt I will adjust eventually, but for now, I feel just a bit slower. I do appreciate that both it and the Magic Trackpad 2 are rechargeable via a Lightning cable, though their initial charges are still holding out.

As for the Magic Trackpad 2, I appreciate the increase in real estate and it’s a very attractive device, but I’m still getting used to the faux-clicking. I’ve turned off Force Click for the moment, because I still haven’t heard any really great reasons for leaving it on, and because I found the second-level of clicking kind of distracting. I may eventually switch to Silent Clicking[^silentrunning], since the haptics still provide the illusion of a click sound. Also, I use tap-to-click a lot, so I’m used to the whole not-clicking thing. [^eaitsuckers]

Conclusion

Granted, I’ve used this computer for less than a week, and much of that time was a long weekend, so I really haven’t had a chance to put it through its paces yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles longer podcasts and somewhat more challenging tasks like an upcoming session for Total Party Kill. Heck, maybe I’ll finally try out some Mac games that I’ve been putting off. All in all, though, I expect this iMac to take me through the next six years—or more—no problem.⁵

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

July 5, 2017 10:53 AM PT

Spam in my kitchen: The Amazon Echo Show arrives

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

So I got an Amazon Echo Show last week—this is the Amazon Echo model with the screen on the front. If you’ve seen the pictures, it looks like a weird ’80s TV set, but a lot of that has to do with a lack of scale in many photos—it’s quite small, though definitely boxy and strange.

I am going to need to live with the Echo Show for a while to really get a sense of how having a screen affects the Echo experience. It’s clear that what’s in the product today is simply not good enough, but Amazon has shown with the previous Echo that it could constantly add new features and improve the service and software, so I’m at least somewhat optimistic.

I can see the promise of having that screen in my kitchen, because like kitchen TV sets of yore, it can provide video right where you’re working. The Echo Show can stream some live video and play back YouTube clips. I’m not really interested in playing an episode of “The Americans” from Amazon Prime Video while I’m cooking, but given all the apps Amazon has available for its Fire TV platform, I have to wonder if there will be a way for me to get access to other features (like Netflix, or MLB.TV) over time.

For years now I’ve had some repurposed music players that I’ve used as dumb screens around my house to display the current time and the temperature in my backyard, courtesy of my home weather station. They’re getting old and outmoded and I like the idea of using the Echo Show as a place to display similar information so it’s available at a glance.

Unfortunately, right now the Echo Show’s main screen isn’t particularly customizable beyond the background wallpaper image. At its best, it shows me the current time and weather for my town. At its worst, it’s a billboard for garbage news headlines and videos I don’t care about.

Update: In a previous version of this story, I said there was “nothing I could do to stop the flow of stuff I don’t want onto that screen.” This isn’t entirely true, but the state of affairs is maddening. Despite Amazon requiring you to set almost every setting for any Echo device from the Alexa mobile app, the Echo Show does contain a hidden Settings screen that you can bring up either by swiping down from the top of the screen (turns out there’s a menu hidden up there—don’t swipe over the camera lens, though, or you’ll smudge it) or by asking Alexa to show you the settings. On this screen, some of the settings from the Alexa app are available, while others aren’t, and other settings are available only on the device. What a mess.

Among the settings options is a Home Card Preferences sub-menu, that lets you change whether the data cards on the home screen rotate a single time or continuously, and let you turn off Notifications (alerts from skills and other Alexa services), Upcoming Events (from your calendar), Drop In (displaying who’s available for a slightly creepy video peek right now among your Drop In contacts), and Trending Topics (wacky stories and videos!).

Unfortunately, that’s it – and if you turn everything off, you’ll still see a rotating collection of hints about ways you can use the Echo by uttering various phrases. So you can turn off the viral news and video spam, and your own calendar, but the level of control is extremely limited—if you can find it at all.

Otherwise, your best option is to put the device in Do Not Disturb mode, where only a clock shows. But I don’t really want that—there’s information I do want to display on this device, it’s just not what Amazon wants to offer me. If I could configure the Echo Show to just show the time and my current temperature and weather forecast, I’d be much happier. It would be even better if I could choose widgets to put into the rotation and provide actual information of value. Maybe that will come in time?

What I don’t want in my kitchen is spam. And right now, that’s what the Echo Show is doing—it’s spamming my eyes when I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to give it a little bit of time for Amazon to get its act together, but it’s embarrassing that this product shipped with this feature as the default. It’s like buying a TV set or car stereo that can’t be taken out of showroom demo mode.

If you’re an Echo fan who is considering an Echo Show, steer clear for now. The fact that there is a setting (albeit hidden on the device) is reason for hope that things will get better. But the customizability of the home screen needs a lot of work.